Spoilers: 1-DC (89o), HI-216 Graphic Calculator (89o), Aperture Tag (Aperture Tag Team), Portal Stories: Mel (Prism Game Studios), Treasure Adventure Game (Robit Games), Treasure Adventure World (Robit Games), Ori and the Blind Forest (Moon Studios), Holes (Louis Sachar), Exo One (Exbleative)
It's easy to point out unpolished and simply low quality aspects of some works − bad audio mixing, awkward dialogue, bugs, frustrating level design... However, as counterintuitive as it may sound, you perhaps don't always want to make everything as good as possible. These "low quality" aspects can add to a work's value − and I'm not talking about the "so bad it's good" phenomenon, I'm talking about works that are generally good, but get even better because some aspects of them are flawed (in the traditional sense of the word).
Let's start simple: quality. If you've ever participated in a game jam, you've likely come across tons of games which are simply poorly made, for no other reason than the creator's inexperience and lack of skill in certain areas. Bugs, programmer art, repetitive levels, frustrating game design, lack of balancing... (Similarly, there are amateur books and songs. Movies from inexperienced creators are a little less common, but you've still got dung like The Incredible Bulk.) I am no exception to this rule, and almost all of my early games featured many of these mistakes. Such things usually do detract from a work's value and enjoyability.
But here's my counterpoint, starting with a little story about me. A couple years after I had started making games, I released a game called 1000-BIT. At the time, I still had the mindset that low quality is bad, period. So, I made nice animations for everything, introduced a load of extras to unlock, a (rather mediocre) story, achievements, a chiptune soundtrack. The only major flaw was the mediocre level design.
Then, the year after that, I released 1-DC, the next game in the series – but counterintuitively, I made some things worse than in 1000-BIT, the most obvious of which is the downgrade in music quality. Instead of properly polished, clean and elegant chiptune beats, 1-DC has... just humming. (1000-BIT OST vs. 1-DC OST)
I am actually very glad I made this choice, as opposed to making another well-mastered electronic soundtrack. Why? Because music is not there just to sound good in a game. It, just like all other elements of the game, serve a single common purpose. In my games, that purpose is usually to establish a tone. The tone of 1000-BIT is a fun and interesting programming challenge. The tone of 1-DC is the pathetic life and work of a man following his cruel and selfish actions. While the gameplay itself is "allowed" to be fun, I had to ensure that there was this constant background of pitifulness, so that the player could step back and look at how much the protagonist's life had worsened, and how he had just... accepted it, even appreciated it, to bring his mind off of his situation. In fact, I think the fun in the programming itself adds to this feeling by providing contrast (though that may just be confirmation bias). In any case, the credits theme (Perpetual Torment) is, I think, a perfect summary of how the protagonist feels.
Another very important aspect of games is player education: tutorials, the learning curve, all of that. It's a thing that beginners as well as adept developers can mess up. I'm sure we can all think of those games which had such a difficult and unintuitive learning curve that it was a wonder we continued playing them − if we did actually continue playing. (That sentence is a placeholder because I couldn't actually think of any games like that myself...)
One famous example of a game which thrived despite − or maybe because of − its strange learning curve is Minecraft Alpha. This early version of Minecraft had no tutorial (the "tutorial level" button in the main menu had never been made functional). There were no pop-ups to guide you, no advancements to suggest what to do next, no structures showing certain mechanics of the game, no crafting guide to show you how to make tools or armor. You just dropped into the world, and, well, good luck. If you didn't know what to do from friends or from the internet, you could get lost very easily. This is obviously not a good way of introducing new players to the game, hence why the current versions of Minecraft include all the features I just mentioned.
However, replaying Minecraft Alpha today, I can definitely say that the lack of guidance leads to it giving players its own, unique sense of mastery. You are dropped into a foreign world − quite different from the one we live in − and are expected to survive and thrive, just like that. You need to research information such as crafting recipes, mob loot and ore generation on your own. The world does not share any of its secrets, and the lack of any useful information in the F3 (debug) menu only adds to that – it doesn't even show your XYZ coordinates, making navigation an extremely useful skill. You need to learn tricks like telling cardinal directions by looking at the orientation of cracks on the floor, or telling the time of day by the color of fog when you're underground.
I would also like to mention at this point the graphic calculator HI-216, for which I made an emulator some time ago. I recommend taking a look at it fresh, without any spoilers, if you like maths and programming. It's pretty fun to play around with.
Are they gone? Okay, well, I lied. I didn't make any emulator, this is actually just another video game that I designed. It was meant to be the next game in the series after 1000-BIT and 1-DC. After developing the latter, I realized just what a pain in the backside making an actual tutorial is, especially for a programming game whose very concept is difficult to teach to people not already acquainted with it. So, for this game, I said screw it, there's no tutorial. There's a manual and that's it, figure it out yourself. I also chose not to include any in-game text editor like in 1000-BIT, as that game had taught me what a pain in the backside that was to make. (Even now, updating the game, I'm facing new issues... I can't type the letter "i" for whatever reason.) All code has to be written in an external text editor, like Notepad. Finally, as the cherry on top, I added the soundtrack not playing in the game itself, but simply as MP3 files in the game folder.
All of this was done, again, to enhance the tone − this time a hacky, ARG-like tone, fed by the content of the game page as well, where I pretend that I didn't make the actual calculator itself. I wanted the player to feel like they were exploring a real-world technological invention, much like those people who make computers and graphics cards out of breadboards and whatnot. Thus, the player has to inform themselves on their own − no hand-holding, no easy interfaces, no helpful hints. In the end I also linked this nicely with the story (of course I had to include a story in a graphic calculator, why not?) although you'll have to play it yourself to see what I mean.
These points can, of course, be extended into other media. In books, this "lack of tutorials" can be seen as the introduction into a world in media res, without prior explanation (the antithesis of this is stuff like Tolkien's long explanation of what a hobbit is at the start of The Hobbit). What I especially like is when books don't explain their vocabulary or unique concepts explicitly, but leave it up to the reader to infer what they mean or represent from the context. A recent example that I remember enjoying is Revenger by Alastair Reynolds − a generally, eh, quite good book, but what really caught my attention was the use of new words, such as "lungstuff" instead of "air" − in particular, as the word "air" is not mentioned anywhere, and the meaning of "lungstuff" is not explained, this leads, I think, to a deeper, more natural understanding of the world and more immersion.
Next, I would like to look at bugs − obviously, if they are game-breaking, immersion-ruining or unfair-death-causing, they can be quite a nightmare and removing them is vital for a game to remain somewhat fun. However, going back to the old versions of Minecraft − and I am mostly speaking about Alpha 1.1.2_01 here, the last good version − I believe that the bugs add to the sense of mastery I mentioned before with education in games. For example, you can store more items in your inventory by using the crafting menu; the items don't drop out when you close your inventory. (Similarly, in Terraria, you can store some items in your Ammo slots when you run out of space, or some accessories in your vanity slots. These aren't bugs, however, just semi-obscure game mechanics.)
Knowledge like this, an understanding of the game's inner workings to gain an advantage, is important for video games, as it gives a game more hidden depth and a higher skill ceiling. It's worthy to note, however, that such knowledge is also present in modern versions of Minecraft and many other modern games, most often in the form of "speedrun tech", i.e. hidden (and sometimes unintentional) game mechanics that speedrunners use to save time. It's just the specific bugs or mechanics in question that are different. (In modern Minecraft, for instance, the F3 menu can be used to find buried treasure – which normally requires finding a map – mere seconds after entering the game.)
All of this is a very long way of saying that bugs are not always bad; as Snoman Gaming said in his video on speedrunning, sometimes it's a good idea to keep a few bugs that can give the player an advantage if they possess the appropriate skills. Just make sure they're not easily exploitable (and don't crash the game).
Now, let's talk about games with characters and dialogue (obviously this extends into movies and books as well). For developers who aren't writers, and even for actual writers, this is easy to mess up with awkward, immature or annoying dialogue. This is the case in the Portal 2 mod Aperture Tag, where instead of a portal gun, you have a gun that shoots gels. The main and only character in the game (aside from the protagonist) is Nigel, a personality core (i.e. a robot) whose lines were probably written by a 9-year-old, while the voice actor is some random guy off the street who didn't even know what voice acting is before starting. This mod dared me to turn off voice audio from the beginning all the way until the end.
I would argue that this gives the game an advantage, however. Why? Because at the end of the mod, Nigel betrays you in a way similar to Wheatley in Portal 2. This was so unbelievably unexpected for me precisely because of the horrible dialogue. Nigel responded in ways that are so predictable and infantile that I would have never assumed he would just casually kill me at the end. Furthermore, because it actually sounds like Nigel is a 9-year-old from his dialogue, his betrayal gives him the effect of a cold-blooded, insane killer, which is probably even scarier than GLaDOS' ruthless yet clearly and visibly evil killing.
A counterexample to this argument is Virgin − oh, sorry, I meant Virgil (the former would be a far more appropriate name) − the personality core guiding you through Portal Stories: Mel, another excellent mod for Portal 2. The problem with Virgin is that he's just barely better written and voice-acted than Nigel, pushing him from Horrible to Strongly Mediocre; furthermore, there is no sudden twist at the end. His story line goes exactly as you would expect, with a heartfelt and unbearably awkward thank-you speech at the end. The game doesn't use Virgin's bad dialogue for anything new and unexpected; he is just cringey and that is that.
Similarly to predictable dialogue, some games benefit from having a simple and even visibly "game-y" story. One example that really stood out to me was Treasure Adventure Game, a hidden indie gem.
The backstory of TAG is actually super cliché. There was a wizard fighting a powerful demon, who made 12 legendary artifacts, and now you're traveling the world to retrieve them. Really fits the game-y "find the 3 chaos emeralds to unlock the 7 towers of darkness to fight the 12 demons of the depths" kind of trope, if you know what I mean. However, at the end of the game, when you go through the final door in the temple and reach the treasure, suddenly it becomes a lot more real.
Apart from the music, so strange and different from the rest of the soundtrack, you have the sudden betrayal by Baggus, who has been helping you since the beginning, and a dramatic reveal of the true identity of your parrot friend who was actually your father all along. Then, a rich company owner reveals himself to be a powerful demon who is the final boss of the game − the same one who had killed that wizard in the lore.
That escalated quickly, didn't it?
And that moment (especially Baggus' betrayal, where he literally pulls out a gun) was, to me, all the more powerful because the rest of the game was just so game-y. There was no point in treating any of the conflicts very seriously: they made a fascinating lore, sure, but you're not really emotionally engaged in any of these conflicts because you can clearly tell they're "made for a game", they all serve a clear purpose in this story about a random kid running around collecting treasures.
This is also why I was so skeptical of the remake of TAG, Treasure Adventure World. In addition to losing the charm (that buzzword that video essay writers just love to throw around) of the original, because TAW 'wants' to be more than a game, i.e. it has more immersion, all those reveals and betrayals at the end of the game feel more natural and logical, thus taking away from their emotional power. In other words: TAG felt like a fun adventure that suddenly went into murder and evil, whereas TAW felt like a tale about evil that naturally led to murder and evil.
Looking at a different game, Ori and the Blind Forest does not really benefit from such an oversimplification of the story. I would argue that this is because this game has so much more effort put into the art and world design and sound design and full orchestral soundtrack and voice acting; because all the rest of the game was made to be so serious and "professional", the story ought to be made to such a standard as well, more like in Hollow Knight, as opposed to "find the 3 keys to unlock the 3 dungeons to restore the 3 elements to heal the forest."
While TAG clearly uses all of its elements to emphasize its game-y-ness, Ori (or OatBF, however you want to abbreviate it) does the exact opposite, i.e. immersion. The story is, then, the only element of the game that detracts from that immersion, whereas TAG uses all of its elements to emphasize this lack of immersion. Therefore, I believe Ori would have been better with a rich, deep and original story. Moreover, Ori currently does not use the low-quality story for anything like TAG does with its dramatic reveals. The only things that I could call 'plot twists' in this game had nothing to do with this simplicity.
Similarly, a game called Bloo Kid 2 suffers from the same problem, although in a different way. This game is extremely game-y, one might even call it painfully generic (although I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing). The story, however, is so utterly bare-bones that it screams "I was only added here because every game needs a story, right?" Seriously. 4 of the 6 'cutscenes' are just the villain going right and Bloo Kid chasing it.
But my problem with this game is not the simplicity of the story, but simply the fact that this simplicity was not used for anything at all. It begins blandly, continues blandly and ends blandly. In contrast, TAG begins blandly, continues... quite semi-blandly as well, but finishes with a strong emotional surprise for the player. I appreciate, however, that not all games are made to be emotional rollercoasters and some are just made with the intention of being fun, and that's okay. I'm only criticizing BK2 here as a contrast to TAG.
Now, extending this concept beyond the realm of video games, one of my new favorite albums, Real Is Magic Is Real by Funny Death (hey look! There they are again, what a surprise), is a prime example. The album is very cliché in its choices of scales and melodies (much like Gone), often relying on the most basic pentatonic scales with repetitive melodies and typical structuring. From a music elitist point of view, I could admonish this album for being such an uncreative, typical pop album that is made just to appeal to the masses, with no regard for experimentation and exploration of the realm of music.
But guess what? That's not what I think. In addition to just really enjoying the album as it is, because of the emotions it evokes, there is also a pleasant and hidden deeper meaning (more emotional than precise) that is shown mainly by the tracks Cognitive Dissonance and We've Modded You, which have quite dark lyrics for such a chillwave album. The album's apparent simplicity ties in perfectly with what I believe to be the message and, again, makes the darker tracks contrast even more and create juxtapositions with the musical content of the rest of the album. (A nice touch that not everyone will notice is the female voice that seems to say "thank you" in the latter half of the track – really gives me chills.)
Another example that utilizes a "lack of immersion" in a different medium is the book Holes by Louis Sachar, one of my favorites. It is very excellently written in that it contains seemingly impossible coincidences, such as Stanley Yelnats' name being a palindrome, that give it such a lighthearted and childlike tone. However, the events of the book, which include child labor, meaningless torture and discrimination, again clash with that lightheartedness. In the end, it creates a unique sort of mentality that I think everyone should adopt: being aware of the cruelties and realities of the world, but still seeing the world through a lens of childlike optimism and playfulness. This is how Sachar used this "bad" lack of immersion to not only identify his audience (children), but also communicate subliminally a deeper message. Impressive.
Lastly, I would like to mention story comprehensibility, i.e. how easy it is for a new player, reader or viewer to understand what's going on in a game or book or movie. I think a perfect "textbook" example of how to do this well is Portal and Portal 2, where all the necessary information is supplied through dialogue or the environment, in a clear yet immersive way, much like a good movie. This is not an essay on how to write a script and I'm not very good at it myself, so I won't analyze here how it's done.
I only used Portal 2 as a counterexample to the game Exo One, which I made a whole 30-minute video essay about. But here, I just want to focus on how the story is communicated. In terms of what happened before the game, all we know comes from these short, ambiguous dialog snippets (example below), and we're usually unsure of when they were said and who actually said them: who's "Voice", who's Clara, who's "Informant"? What are their relationships? We have no idea. In terms of what actually happens during the game, well, not much happens aside from the ship (which looks like a ball or frisbee) flying across various planets and landing on monoliths.
REPORTER: There's nothing in the design for a cockpit, no internal space for a pilot. How do you fly it?
VOICE: We have to stop thinking in human terms and trust their design
VOICE: Anyway... it does more than just fly.
While the idea of time travel is quite clearly communicated through various techniques (mainly a repetition of a section of dialog with a different ending), the precise details of what actually happens are left quite a mystery. When writing my essay on Exo One, I went through the whole game to write down all the pieces of dialog as well as a comprehensive set of questions that each lore theory should try to answer − it's clear that quite a bit of effort is needed from anyone who wants to try to understand Exo One's story, even on a surface level.
So why the hell do I think this is a good thing?
Well, consider this. Exo One is a game about aliens, time travel, flying through planets trillions of light-years away from ours. It would be oversimplified, almost arrogant to write a story about such unexplored, nearly magical things in a way that is clearly understandable for the layperson in the 2020s. (This could be a criticism of movies that portray stuff like aliens and AI in a clear "Hollywood" way – including Portal 2!) What's more, once you replay the game and reread the dialog, you begin to get an intuitive, emotional understanding of what's happening. Rather than trying to explain the science behind it, this game intentionally obfuscates what's happening to make the events seem truly out of this world. In addition, it links with one of the lore theories that these dialog snippets are the pilot's memories – it is usually the case with memories that they're blurry and imprecise. In that sense, this obfuscation serves a story purpose as well.
I sadly can't think right now of a specific counterexample to this, where a story's incomprehensibility is a bad thing, but I suppose it would be the case for any game with a more traditional, down-to-earth story where this obfuscation doesn't serve a specific purpose − for example, to make the story feel alien and otherworldly. (Help me in the comments maybe?)
So, that just about wraps up my thoughts on how, counterintuitively, putting less effort into some aspects of a work can lead to a richer experience than if those aspects were done mediocrely, and perhaps even richer than if those aspects were done as best as possible. Ultimately, a creator's job is to think about the purpose of their works and make choices to help attain that purpose. Is it to appeal to a large audience? Then you better make it enjoyable and simply well made in the popular and traditional sense. Is it to make a statement or convey a feeling? Then it might be better to sacrifice enjoyability and quality to make all the aspects of your work support that main idea.
I'd also like to mention that it's very likely the decisions I pointed out here were, in reality, caused by different factors than what I described or were made subconsciously or unintentionally – you know that old joke that English teachers always overanalyze everything? However, I still think this analysis was worthwhile because not only was it a good exercise, but now we can use those unintentional decisions intentionally in our own works to create a similar effect. And that, ladies, gentlemen and other gentlehumans, is the strength of analysis.
Thank you for reading this essay. If you have any criticism to my conclusions or want to add something, I'd be very happy to hear it in the comments.